The Weird Pillar - Spiritual Fitness, Moral Injury, and the Stuff We Can’t Measure
Libby Alders
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The Weird Pillar — Spiritual Fitness, Moral Injury, and the Stuff We Can't Measure
Spiritual fitness has always been the pillar nobody quite knows what to do with. This week Drew and Alex sit down with Libby Alders — chaplain, researcher, library technician, and self-described tri-vocational nerd — to actually figure out what it is, why it matters, and why the military keeps trying to slap a number on something that might not need one.
This one goes deep. Grab a coffee.
What we get into:
What spiritual fitness actually means — and it's not what most people assume. Libby breaks it down to four things: knowing what you believe, understanding that beliefs should evolve, being able to coexist with people who believe differently, and being able to recognize harmful or radicalizing ideologies when they show up.
The Spiritual Fitness Metric — how a team of researchers took a pool of nearly a thousand questions, distributed a survey to the entire SOCOM population, and eventually distilled it into an 18-question tool with three subscales: horizontal (community and belonging), mixed (purpose and meaning), and vertical (relationship to the transcendent or divine). What they found, and where the construct validity got complicated.
Moral injury versus PTSD — and why the difference matters for who you call. Libby's shorthand: shame points toward moral injury and the chaplain. Guilt and fear point toward PTSD and psych. When guilt starts to outpace fear and hypervigilance, check on the moral injury component.
Why the research on religion reducing PTSD risk might be missing a confounding variable — moral injury. If the thing that gives your life meaning is also the thing that got violated, you don't have a protective factor. You have an opening.
The 724th Special Tactics case study — how Libby and former podcast guest Chris ran focus groups instead of surveys, built a communication tool instead of a formal metric, and ended up with leadership asking to do their own version because the unit couldn't stop talking about it. Rotator cuff surgeries prevented. Utilization up. Cost: remarkably low.
Capability-based blueprinting — what it is, why more of the military should use it, and why copy-paste templates are the enemy of actually helping people. The goal is frameworks and principles, not products.
The interdisciplinary team problem — why nobody knows when to call the chaplain, why over-specialization and over-generalization are both failure modes, and what "informed consumer" training actually looks like in practice.
The table theology tangent — why the ritual of eating together is a human performance intervention that no macro calculator captures, and why we've designed dining facilities almost perfectly to destroy meaningful connection.
Civilian spiritual care providers — why Libby thinks it should exist, why the endorser system and deployment requirements make the chaplain pipeline almost impossibly narrow, and why opening it up would unlock a wave of second-career talent the military currently can't access.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Spiritual Fitness Metric — developed at CHAMP, now under ARMR
Dr. Harold Koenig, Duke University — geriatric psychiatrist and pioneer in spirituality, religion, and health research
Dr. Warren Kinghorn, Duke — another key name at the intersection of mental health and spiritual health
Capability-Based Blueprinting — developed within CHAMP, Dr. Chamberlain's work
Matt Larson — former podcast guest, moral injury talk from the H2F Symposium coming soon to the MOPs & MOEs Instagram
Charles Vogel, The Art of Community — former podcast guest, Yale Divinity School; the ritual of meals chapter alone is worth the read
Allen Frances, Saving Normal — Drew and Alex's white whale guest. Chaired the DSM-IV committee. By DSM-V, had renounced the whole enterprise. If you know him, please help.
Rants and Rituals — Libby's upcoming podcast. No one take that name.
Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic →
If physical fitness answers the question "can I perform" — spiritual fitness doesn't answer the question. It asks it.
Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.
